Case Study – Randwick City Council
Introduction
Randwick City, located about six kilometres south-east of the City of Sydney, is the oldest municipality in NSW outside the
city centre. Although highly urban itself, to the north and west of the suburb Randwick is adjacent to
Green Park and the world famous Centennial Park, and to Randwick Race Course, one of
Australia's iconic race tracks. Recently, Randwick Council won the Excellence in Overall
Environmental Management award, granted by the United Nations Association of Australia. Randwick City is one of the largest in NSW, covering an area
of 36.5 square kilometres, with its Council serving 120,000 residents. Before
Council adopted Infocouncil for the management of its agendas and minutes,
Randwick used a system written specially for it in Lotus
Notes. Infocouncil was licensed in September 2007. The following
before-and-after case study summarises information provided by Julie Hartshorn,
Senior Administrative Coordinator, in January 2009. All quotations are from Ms
Hartshorn.
Before Infocouncil
Reports
The system was manual, and did not specifically provide for
attachments, which had to be manually inserted at the bottom of reports in
either Word or picture format. Many attachments were consigned to ‘under
separate cover’.
Agendas
Problems lay, not with difficulties, but with inefficiencies.
One of the major irritations was that late reports made a mess of sequencing or
pagination, each of which had to be remedied manually. Confidential and open
Council reports were included in the one agenda, “… making it a manual
process to save and produce agendas with (and without) the confidential items.
The process was subject to user error.”
Minutes
Minutes were kept in real time, but only using Word
documents, “… with some shortcuts we had established for ourselves.”
Filing and publication
The main problem was that the procedure did not integrate
with TRIM. This “… resulted in time delays – particularly with the finalising
of the minutes and distribution of action items. The creation of action items
from the minutes and ‘TRIMming’ them was a manual and time consuming process.”
After Infocouncil
There were few organisational or political issues to deal
with in the conversion to Infocouncil. “Most people understood that we needed
a system that integrated with TRIM.”
Reports, agendas and minutes
There was a marked transformation away from holdups and
inefficiencies, “… particularly associated with authorising, ordering
reports, producing minutes and action items and the integration with TRIM.”
Ease of access to information
There has been noticeable improvement in this area, not least
for the public. “The Infocouncil webpage is much more user friendly than the
old system that Council used.”
Efficiency of time usage
As noted, procedures for authorising reports and organising
them for the agenda, plus producing action items, have been greatly improved. As
to minutes, "the functionality in the Minutes saves a lot of time at meetings
– block resolve, the outline tool and the insert division tools have been
particularly useful.”
Rating the past and present processes
In comparing the two systems ‘as a whole’, Julie Hartshorn
gave the earlier system a rating of 6 out of 10. Infocouncil she rated 9 out of
10.
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Previous system
1 2
3 4 5
6 7 8
9 10
|
Infocouncil
1 2
3 4 5
6 7 8
9 10
|
Suggestions for future versions of Infocouncil
Survey respondents are invited to nominate any changes or
additions which would improve Infocouncil in the future. Ms Hartshorn noted:
- Ability to ‘un-authorise’ reports would be
useful from Randwick’s perspective. [Has since been added to the software]
- It would be useful to have the ability to upload action sheets item by item, and also TRIM them item by item. [Development
of this is in process and slated for delivery in 2011]
Wrap-up
Randwick Council has found there is no area in which the
production and management of business papers has not been significantly improved
by the adoption of Infocouncil for these purposes.
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